9:45 Krispy Kreme Fundraiser

9:46 As I don’t trust it to work, as I don’t control it, let’s be proactive and do it early, so if it blows up in our faces, at least it blows up early and has time to recover.

Trust me.

9:50 Creating your own Rayman Inspired Character: Hands

This morning you are tasked with creating the next element of our Rayman inspired character – the hands.

The “hands”

Today we are going to create the hands of your character. Last year we I limited to students to very basic hands as the fine detail in finger animation isn’t really what we are focusing on with this character. I will not require your character to bend fingers for example. Try to create a design or pose that can jump, scare, pick up, climb, without animating fingers. Of course if you want to you are welcome to.

Here is a model of a “neutral” and position, compared to a fist, or holding something. If you are going to go for a realistic look, I would recommend using this image as a good jumping off point:

To make our life easier while we learn:

If you want fingers that animate (think knuckles) than use separate objects

If you want a very organic looking hand like above it may not be able to animate as it is a single object

If you do want a very organic looking hand and want to animate it (Davin) you are going to have to go above and beyond the requirements for this project – which is fine – but it may mean you have to rig it yourself. We just aren’t focusing on that with our 2 first characters.

Work simple, keep quads, and add the Subdivision modifier after you get through working a bit. Don’t rely on it immediately – block out your content first with more basic modeling!

Remember we are going to create 1 hand and then reflect it for the other. Focus all your efforts into a single “good” hand.

Create 3 renders called “lastnameHand_1.jpg” through “lastnameHand_3.jpg” and upload to your “week_09” folder on the web server.

First we will watch a quick “Sizzle Reel” of what can be done with UE.

UE4 (Unreal Engine Version 4) is free to use, with a 5% royalty on gross product revenue after the first $3,000 per game per calendar quarter from commercial products. If your games start making $12,000 a year in revenue, you will owe Unreal $600.I just don’t think we need to worry about that just yet…

The first thing we have to do is create an account for each of you. This will allow you to work from home, work anywhere there is an internet connect and Unreal is installed.

Once we do that, let’s jump into a first person shooter map (guns are bad in school, but it is what it is).

Today we are going to explore and play, get used to the interface, mess around, any maybe even if we have time export something from Blender to Unreal. It is very important to see the connection and workflow between the different programs, they don’t live on little islands by themselves.

12:10 Lunch (30 Minutes)

Today you are going to be focused on an Andy Interaction animation with a second character. The goal of the project is to practice character animation between two characters, in our case floating droid like robots.

Some possible types of interactions (not limited to, but good jumping off points):

Tag

Fight

Dance

** So long as you are practicing animation between two characters I am happy. Topics such as “Andy looks at other character sleeping” is not what we are looking for.

The scene is limited to white infinite lighting and limited props. I am giving you zero credit for any additional modeling and texturing, I am grading you on the animation, so don’t spend too much time making a way cool widget. The animation is the key.

For this project I am going to allow sounds as I have a feeling you will want to add them to develop your project.

When complete give me material previews of your animation called “andyInteraction.mp4” at 1080p and upload to your shared “week_09” folder. Previews can go right into Premier just as any other mp4.